Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the level of availability of cancer gene tests is on the NHS; and whether the NHS prioritises such tests for people whose families have a history of cancer.

NHS England is committed to implementing the Independent Cancer Taskforce’s recommendations on molecular diagnostics, meaning that around 25,000 additional people will have their cancers genetically tested every year to identify the most effective treatments. NHS England will continue to invest in building the infrastructure for genomics and by the end of 2018/19, will have developed a genomic medicine service for England, underpinned by a new consolidated genomic laboratory infrastructure and facilitated by informatics, data and analytical platforms to enable the sequencing data we generate to improve clinical practice. Once established, the new genomic laboratory infrastructure for the National Health Service in England will support rare, inherited and acquired disease, to support the NHS to deliver personalised medicine to all eligible patients.